In the context of ‘Shipwreck Tourism’, shipwrecks in Indian waters have been explored at Sunchi Reef, Amee Shoals and Grande Island. Where are these locations?

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Correct — A, Off the coast of Goa. All three names in the stem belong to the same small stretch of sea at the mouth of the Zuari, outside Mormugao (Marmagao) harbour, and all three have been surveyed by the Marine Archaeology Centre of CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography at Dona Paula, Goa. Sila Tripati and Ravi Korisettar's review of Indian shipwreck archaeology in Current Science (vol. 117, no. 10, 25 November 2019) opens by listing the sites investigated so far and names 'Sunchi Reef, St George's Reef, Amee Shoals, Sail Rock, Grande Island off Goa' as one group, before moving on to the other coasts. Each is a distinct wreck. Sunchi Reef, worked from 1989 — the first shipwreck investigation ever mounted in Indian waters — lies in only 3 to 6 m of water over laterite bedrock and yielded cast-iron guns about 2 m long, a brass handgun barrel, Martaban stoneware storage jars, Chinese blue-on-white sherds, eight elephant tusks, nine hippopotamus teeth, an iron anchor and dressed granite ballast blocks; thermoluminescence dating of the pottery (360 ± 40 years) and radiocarbon dating of the ivory place it in the early 17th century CE, making it the oldest wreck yet surveyed anywhere in Indian waters and the first Portuguese wreck to be documented in detail. Grande Island enters the list through the wreck at St George's Reef, which the same review locates 'on the eastern side of Grande Island' at 15 m depth — a 19th-century cargo vessel whose bricks and floor tiles carry the stamp 'Basel Mission Tile Works 1865' and whose timbers are benteak (Lagerstroemia microcarpa). Amee Shoals lies just south of Sunchi Reef, close to Marmagao bay, at 6 to 9 m: three wrought-iron Scotch boilers, boiler bricks stamped 'FURNA…' and 'B 84', flanges and a water tank, from a steel-hulled, triple-expansion steamer roughly 100 m long that grounded on the shoals while working in or out of Mormugao port, dated to 1880 CE or later.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Not a random wrong coast — Lakshadweep genuinely is one of India's main wreck-diving grounds, which is exactly why it is offered. But its sites carry different names. Archival records list five wrecks in the shallows off Minicoy between 1862 and 1910 — SS Colombo, SS Thrunscoe, Duffryn Manor, SS Delagoa and the sailing ship Tolna — and CSIR-NIO explored three of them between 1994 and 2001. CSIR-NIO and the Indian Navy surveyed Byramgore Reef with INS Sandhayak in 1990, war material lies on Suheli Par, and the Archaeological Survey of India's Underwater Archaeology Wing worked a wreck off Bangaram with the Navy in 2002. Minicoy, Suheli Par, Byramgore, Bangaram — none of them is Sunchi, Amee or Grande.  (c) Tamil Nadu has one famous explored wreck and it is not on this list. A wooden-hulled ship was found 3.5 km off Poompuhar, the ancient Chola port at the mouth of the Kaveri, lying at 19 m; airlifting brought up a large quantity of lead ingots, a 2.1 m iron cannon and a copper rudder gudgeon, with ingots stamped 1791 and 1792 by the W: Blackett company, so the wreck post-dates those years. Candidates who half-remember that Poompuhar and marine archaeology go together, or who associate underwater exploration with the submerged-city work off the Tamil coast, are the ones this option is written for.  (d) Odisha's explored wreck sits off Konark, on the northern side of the temple coast, where boilers, a cabin, a winch and anchor chain have been recorded — boilers comparable in size to those at Amee Shoals, which is precisely the confusion this option invites. India Meteorological Department records show many ships destroyed by cyclones off Odisha between 1832 and 1900, and archival sources place H. M. ship Carron on the seabed four miles north of Konark in July 1820. Real wreck coast, real exploration, wrong place names — the stem's three toponyms are Goan, and two of them are Portuguese-derived.

Concept: Marine or underwater archaeology studies the material remains of seafaring that now lie below water — sunken ports, submerged settlements and shipwrecks. In India it is barely four decades old. S. R. Rao's excavations off Dwarka in the late 1970s created the discipline here, and in 1981 a Marine Archaeology Centre was set up at the CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography in Dona Paula, Goa, becoming an integral division of NIO in 1990. Archival research has yielded information on more than 200 wrecks in Indian waters, almost all of them post-16th-century, because European trading companies kept the shipping records that Indian sources do not. The wrecks so far explored belong to the 17th–20th centuries, the transition from wood to iron hulls and from sail to steam, so each one is a datable snapshot of maritime technology as well as of trade. Goa's dominance in the field is not accidental: the national laboratory that does the diving is in Goa, the Portuguese kept meticulous loss registers, and the approaches to Mormugao are laced with submerged laterite reefs and shoals that sank ships for four centuries. 'Shipwreck tourism' is the recreational face of the same resource — recreational divers visiting wrecks that archaeologists have already recorded.

State PCS 2023 Q31 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q31 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer